Despite imagining that this morning brought some sort of Insight to the effect that I need to quit hanging on to pennies and try to invest something in building my little business enterprises…Jayzus!
This evening at Compline I was reminded that tomorrow we’re supposed to be doing a potluck surprise party for one of the veteran choir members. Oh god. I don’t have any party food and I don’t have any time to fix stuff like that, so that means I’m going to have to go out and buy something, and my grocery budget for this week is spent and then some, since I blew most of my food budget restocking my much-depleted Hoard. By the 21st, when the new February-March discretionary budget cycle started, I was out of everything from beans to toilet paper and so spent two hours at Costco buying everything in sight. Ohhhkayy…
Then I was told that afterward we’re all supposed to go down to Trinity Cathedral to continue the celebration at the concert that’s going on there tomorrow evening.
These concerts happen continuously, and you have to be fairly affluent to be able to drop $20 here, $30 there, and more every time you turn around. I can’t afford to go out to lunch, for godsake, much less trot around town to expensive evenings in performance halls.
{sigh} I was dismayed enough to blurt out that I just couldn’t afford to do that, and I got a look like I was a man-eating whale that had just flopped up the sidewalk on the lam from Sea World.
Well, said they, the cost has been reduced to ten dollars.
Yeah.
And that amount the COBRA bureaucrats told me I’d be paying each month? Wrong! After I went down to the COBRA office and forked over the $313 they announced I was to pay at first of this month, this week they served me with a past due notice for another big chunk of dough and then demanded over $200 for next month’s premium!
That alone might have been manageable, but combine it with the grocery restocking mission and you have…yes! Penury!
Everybody’s got their hand in your pocket. And that also would be OK, if there were something in the pocket for them to lift. But right now they’re scraping out the lint.
What concerns me is that if I take $2,400 out of the money I squirreled away to carry me through this year and to serve as a stopgap when (not if) expensive emergency bills arise, there won’t be enough to protect me.
All it will take is one huge veterinary bill, one spate of dental work, one car accident, one transmission failure, one small housefire, one good storm that blows the devil-pod tree onto the roof and I’ll be screwed. Screwed, screwed, ge-screwèd!
Speaking of dental work, one reason the COBRA bill is so high is that they didn’t cancel the Delta Dental, as I’d asked them to do (because I knew I couldn’t afford it…). Confronted with this little surprise, I decided to keep the coverage—only another two months remain, and I may be fixin’ to extract a fair amount of benefits from that outfit.
They will cover half the cost of a crown. That’s still not enough to keep the dentist from bankrupting you: half the cost of a crown is still $400 or more. But it’s better than the full freight.
I’m still grinding my teeth. Damn it. I thought the tooth-grinding would stop once I got free of the University from Hell. But noooo. Two more molars are cracked, and a crown that was put on another of the molars I split in my exuberant jaw-clenching is broken. So that’s three new crowns I need.
That’s $1500 or $2000 right there, and we’re only in February.
How do I get off this train, anyway?